Why Do (Some) Men Murder Their Beloved Wives?

There ain't nothing in our way baby, nothing our love couldn't raise above. (Celine Dion)I said to myself: I will fight against everyone, but I will take her. No one will take her from me, and this is what I did. (A murderer)

The prevailing assertion is that wife murder can be explained in terms of a personality mechanism that is categorized as "pathological jealousy" or "sexual possessiveness." We claim that wife murder cannot be explained on the basis of a single male personality trait, but that it is rather a combination of various factors that together produce the foundations for this lethal violence (which is also why this phenomenon is relatively rare in comparison to other forms of domestic violence). We argue that there are conditions of risk that combine together and act upon each other. Such conditions include:

-- When the man perceives the woman to be his whole world so that he feels that any separation from her entails a loss of his own identity-- When his life lacks other sources of meaning and reasons for living-- When the traditional perception of masculinity, which dictates that the male has full power, honor, and control, runs counter to his dependency upon his wife, making that reliance appear evidence of his weakness and humiliation, and an affront to masculine honor. -- When personal behavior is rigid and uncompromising--When prevailing beliefs about love appear to justify the sacrifice of his wife on the one hand and of persistence on the other. In this case, the ideology behind love provides the legitimacy for terrible crimes.When all the above conditions pertain, the risk of wife murder increases.

Another prevailing assumption in the literature is that wife murder is an unintended result of violence that went too far. We argue rather that wife murder cannot be understood in terms of loss of control or a moment of insanity, but is rather a deliberate act, one which is the culmination of emotional distress that has prepared the psychological grounds for committing the murder. As such, it is an act of profound despair, represented by the readiness to destroy another even if this means destroying the self.

Wife murder has been investigated and conceptualized as part of the phenomenon of violence toward women and is often regarded as the pinnacle of such violence. According to the prevailing view, male violence toward women is a continuum, the furthest point of which is murder. This view regards male to female violence and wife murder as issuing from the same basis, and so having a common source and a common explanation. In contrast, we argue that the two phenomena are quite distinct. Violence toward women, according to the accepted view, is a strategy of control. It is behavior intended to ensure obedience and to express authority and power. Murder, however, cannot achieve such a goal. Murder seeks a quite different goal: the destruction of the wife.

Romantic beliefs are not merely abstract ideas; they intervene and color the practice of love. They become standards by which people interpret their experiences of love and guide their own behavior. However, what makes love dangerous does not lie in Romantic Ideology per se, nor is it related to the inevitable disappointment in the face of actual experience. The danger in love lies in its extreme and deceptive nature when, like a religion, it becomes the central symbol of ultimate significance.

Consider, for example, the following testimony of a man who murdered his wife: "She was everything to me. She was my soul. You don't always kill a woman or feel jealousy about a woman or shout at a woman because you hate her. No. Because you love her, that's love. My wife was the kind of woman you'd never murder in your life, unless it was for love, because of madness, at that moment, at that moment a person loses everything, he doesn't think, it's a moment of madness. ... The only thing that I can say is that she was more honest than a Torah Scroll. So why murder someone like that? ... At that moment, you don't remember. You don't remember anything. You don't know what you're doing. Love makes a person stupid. Or maybe, maybe it's not worthwhile loving a woman so much. Maybe you have to love less, less madly, that's the madness of love. ... It's written this way in the Bible, that woman-maybe they mean a woman stranger, but it's my wife, but I'll tell you: 'A good man before God will flee from her, the sinner will be trapped by her.' Did you understand that verse? Maybe I wasn't good before God. Maybe I was a sinner. I was trapped by her. What is that trap? It's love."

The literature on the question of how to understand the murder of women by their husbands maintains that wife murder is motivated by male possessiveness that is expressed in a form of violence toward women that is extreme but not distinct from other expressions of violence. Our findings, however, show that the basis for understanding wife murder is in identifying and acknowledging the rarity of the phenomenon; therefore, our understanding of wife murder is necessarily different from the understanding of the phenomenon of violence towards women. The act of murder is (a) rooted in a unique constellation of factors and circumstances, which together create the infrastructure for the development of murderous violence; (b) the result of a process, the fruit of emotional maturation that creates the psychological resolve needed in order to be able to commit murder, rather than a temporary loss of control, which ostensibly makes the killer unable to understand the consequences and costs of his act; (c) motivated by a mood of deep despair, which creates the desire to destroy another person, even at the cost of self-destruction; (d) a phenomenon distinct from violence against women.

I am struck by how research focuses on individual traits for relationship problems, often with little benefit in improving relationship problems. The murderer in his testomony seems to be noting that relationship problems can lead to emotional decision making. Unfortunately, research has focused much more on business decision making than on marital decision making (power struggles).

In my book Crumbling Commitment: Managing a Marital Crisis, I focus on helping couples to use effective decision making when faced with one or both partners having an uncertain commitment to their marriage. I believe that such information can help couples to avoid violence that springs from desperate pursual of change.

You mention some interesting issues in this and previous articles. And you made me think about N. Peseschkian's postulate that too much of a good virtue enables mental perturbation.

But I have some questions on somethings I haven't totally understood. According to your last points, namely (a) and (b) it could not be a momentaneous "click" of, for instance, finding a wife in bed with someone else? You say that is least likely to happen, correct?

Point (d) isn't clear for me. Maybe something I read here wasn't assimilated. But, my simplist and maybe even reductionist question is: if it is a process, why shouldn't or can't it be the ending of family aggression process?

One last point, if I may. Your study is limited to one single culture (eventhough it's one that has people from all accross the world). Do you think a cross-cultural research could find different conclusions?

The interesting questions of Sam are discussed at length in our book, In the Name of Love. Here I can merely briefly refer to them.
(1) Concerning the possible instantaneous nature of the murder, in our study only one out of the 18 cases can be described in this manner. The emotional nature of the murder does not contradict its deliberative and purposeful nature
(2) We agree that the wife murder can be described as a process, but this does not mean that we are speaking of a process of violence which is culminating in the murder.
(3) Other studies, which have been done in USA, Europe, and Australia, indicate that a significant number of murders were committed, as indeed we have found, on the background of the wife intention to leave the man. We do not think that our findings are limited to a specific culture

I would like to share my experience with the people concern and seek help to resolve it.

I love my wife and she loves me too....But very frequently, the fight between us will be very ferosious. Main reason behind this fight is useless talks of my wife. We are know one of us should shut down so as to end the fight between two. I always try to shut my mouth because whatever she talks is rubbish. But she always pull me and does not even give time for me to keep quite. She starts using abusing words and talks nonsense like" she spoiled her life because of me" and many more. It looks like she enjoys irritating me and she behaves as if she has a vengence on me. Small issues is becoming big and it has gone to the extent of divorce. By heart we both are not very far to take divorce but to avoid these kind of fights i feel divorce is the weapon. It actually looks like a immatured couple running a life with two kids but it is the reality.

How to resolve this kind of problem where in when wife say whatever she say is correct, when wife is a critic of the husband.

Divorce. If she honestly feels she spoiled her life, calmly tell her to unspoil it and find what she's looking for elsewhere. Your kids need to know a marriage like that is not meant to go on. The "small issues" are merely a symptom of her larger anxiety. If her only way of dealing with it is childish bickering, best you show your kids where behavior like that will lead. You don't deserve to be treated that way, your kids don't deserve to be forcifully exposed to it. Take initiative, and tell her to get a new life if she is so burdened by her current one. If she tries to make you feel guilty for it, present her with the divorce papers and end it as quickly and cleanly as possible. You might fare a better chance of have a civil relationship afterwards in regards to raising the kids. At least this way you two will have a commonality you can build on, making sure the little ones you two brought here are going to alright. Nobody is to blame on this, but if nothing is done to change the situation, then you can both blame each other until each of you are blue in the face and your children are on the verge of ripping their ears off.

We tend to justify our "evil" behavior afterwards. I know this guy believes he loved his wife, and since love can be an extremely powerful instinctual reaction, it is hard to say how much control he had over himself. Since his perception of her was not of an individual, but that of a general woman, as mentioned in his biblical quote, that was not too different from all the rest, it is hard to say whether he loved her, desired her, or felt like he had a permanent claim over her.
Love, real love using both thought and emotion, is knowing and appreciating the individual for who and what they are. He viewed her at that time as merely a thing, and a thing that was a dime a dozen. A bad thing. A curse, a burden, a pain that had to be relieved for his sake. Unfortunately he couldn't admit to himself until afterwards just how much she meant to him, when he removed her from his life.
And just like a child, wants us to be more concerned with his emotional pain, then the pain he inflicted on the one he "loved".
Ex: My nephew, Oscar (4), punched his brother (2), and was caught by my brother, his father. Immediately after punching his brother, Oscar started crying like he just fell down a flight of stairs. Why was he crying? To alleviate guilt. Not his guilt he was feeling, but the guilt that others were going to place on him. We like to do what we want, but as a species we are still rusty on accepting blame and consequences. We also have a terrible habit of turning humans into obstacles or undesirable subject matter.

My diagnosis; love doesn't make people stupid, stupid people in love can be extremely dangerous.

my thoughts are if you are going to leave a man.....leave while he is gone and do not tell him before hand. Go with the clothes on your back and take the children with the clothes on their back. Just go. Then get a lawyer to deal with him. If you know he is unstable.......go,go,go

I want to voice my complaint about your choice of photograph which accompanies this article. You sir, as a learned professor, should know better. Since OJ Simplson was exonerated of any and all charges in the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson, why did you choose to place HIS picture front and center in this article? With all the White men that have been proven to be not only murderers of their wives, but their children in familiacides nationwide, why would you put the photo of a BLACK man that was proven innocent. This kind of association is the undercurrent of prejudice and racism in this country Aaron. You really need to check yourself, along with your true attitudes about race and assumption of guilt based on not one legal or substantiated fact. Your article itself was great, but you damaged your creditibility as a fair and unbiased thinker by adding that particular association to your text.

Mr. Simpson was found liable for the deaths in a civil suit. He was not proven innocent, but was aquitted of the charges against him. Later he wrote a book detailing the murder "if he did it". The Goldman family later won the rights to the book and published it. Judith Reagan secured the rights to the book as Mr. Simpson's confession. Read the book. It is a chilling confession to the way Nicole's rejection and hesitation inconvenienced Mr. Simpson to the point that he killed her and her friend. There are details in the confession that would have only been known to the killer. OJ is in jail now for another crime. Doesn't matter what color he is, he was a successful sports figure who lived the American dream and yet let his temper get the better of him, with his ex wife and later with people who had some sports memorabilia that he claimed belonged to him.

After a less than pleasant 15 marriage which produced two children, my husband tried to murder me in my home, and with great force and effort, my 11 year old daughter who had 4 years of martial arts training got the 300 pound beast to release me from the noose he was hanging me in. It was further complicated because we were 7000 miles from home, living in central europe. Some of the factors in this article, if not all, were present. I was the provider, he took care of the house and children, and had become a shut in who refused to go outside the house unless I accompanied him or he absolutely had no choice (for example once there was a fire in our apartment building when I was at work, he did leave the building when it was on fire.

But contrary to the article, He had been violent on several occasions. Since he has been in a swiss prison for trying to kill me, he has been diagnosed as something between a sociopath and a serial killer. The prison psychologist has testified in court that he is certain my husband will find another victim if he is released in the USA, perhaps many of them, unless he agrees to undergo treatment.

What is curious to me is that my husband insists that he is sane, and needs no treatment.

What is probable, two years later trying to keep a career together and continue to support two little girls so far from home, is that although there may not really be time in my schedule to get some therapy to work through the aftermath, I really need to make time. I will do this soon.

Some of the above comments intellectualize the matter too much. I appreciate the real life stories, let me add to those.

How many men still feel the love, and then resent not getting any in return in the relationship, and feel trapped because they have kids and wives always get custody? I know three such couples even in my small circles in which I hear that the wife hasn't sought a kiss or hug, let alone real intimacy, in years, and shun his approach. Worse each of those wives refuse to talk about it or get couples counseling.

How does the man regain some semblance of a life without losing the kids? Worse, anger grows in the man, because it is more likely that the wife is cheating than simply going celibate for her entire thirties. When this anger and feeling of entrapment erupt, might it be the cause of at least some of the interspousal violence?